New NSA Restrictions on Surveillance Implemented by Obama

On Friday, President Barrack Obama said in his first big speech about electronic surveillance that the U.S. is not carrying out spying on ordinary people who are not threat to the national security of the country.

Obama put restrictions on accessing domestic phone records by the National Security Agency. However, the changes announced by the president allow the NSA to continue or even expand the collection of personal information from billions across the globe including foreign citizens and Americans.

Obama succeeded in this by giving spying a narrow definition. During his speech, Obama described his principles for the restriction on the use of the information, but not for the gathering of less information.

Obama used the term bulk collection more than one time in his speech and gave it his biggest endorsement to date.

As digital forms of communication have multiplied and the capabilities of NSA with them, NSA has shifted its resources from surveillance of just individual targets, to acquiring communications on a planet wide scale.

Obama focused on surveillance that Congress has authorized and has been overseen through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

He talked about collecting domestic telephone logs from nearly every American through one provision in the Patriot Act.

However, his fresh promises of better transparency did not do anything about long-standing questions. Spokesmen from intelligence and the White House declined to make a comment as to whether NSA used that authority to gather information of a personal nature or any other type of data from millions of U.S. citizens.

There was hardly any talk about the collection of overseas intelligence, which he on his own authorized, under the intelligence Order 12333.

A Washington newspaper disclosed recently that based on some documents Edward Snowden leaked NSA was gathering millions and millions of address books from e-mail.

Those types of operations have and currently are sweeping in a large amount, yet unknown, of people who travel and communicated with each other from overseas.

The new provision put in by Obama said NSA could presume that the data collected overseas belonged to a foreigner.